Current Show:

A Guest in Wonderland

With the opening of its next exhibition Jan. 17, The Ashby-Hodge
Gallery of American Art at Central Methodist University is inviting
visitors to enter the wonderful, wacky and whimsical world represented
in Fayette resident Peggy Guest's prodigious outpourings of art. Titled
"A Guest in Wonderland: The Multi-Media Works of Peggy Guest," the
exhibition
will
run through March 2. A reception for the artist will be held from
1:30-4:30 p.m. Jan. 22.

More than 60 works will be featured in the exhibition - a
multi-media potpourri of art fashioned by the highly creative
Guest, whose unbounded imagination transcends conventional
approaches to the visual arts by leaps and bounds. In her
collective works, horses have wings, bears and assorted bugs
wear colorful clothing and medieval dragons puff curling wisps
of smoke and float through the air with bemused expressions.

Guest's colorful art embodies the creative richness of Lewis
Carroll's "Alice in Wonderland" and "Through the Looking Glass,"
with L. Frank Baum's characterizations in "The Wizard of Oz"
mixed in. It is art for all ages â bound to delight children
and to bring out remembrances of youth in adults.

The panoply of Guest's art embraces pastels, colored pencil
sketches, watercolors, pen and ink drawings and large,
three-dimensional and sculptured pieces. Flowers are represented
in one series of art works, and an anthropomorphic array of
animal life in others.

Many drawings and paintings have satirical titles reflecting
subject matter, such as "Foxglove," which features an impish red
fox sneaking a peak of a foxglove plant from behind a tree;
"Lady Slipper Orchids," a bright red pair of a girl's slippers
surrounded by colorful orchids; and "Tiger Lilies," a series of
Asian tigers prowling through a jungle of tree lilies. A
four-panel work that starts with plants and animals and
concludes with a characterization of CMU's new Student and
Community Center aptly reflects the eclectic nature of Guest's
art.

"Look long enough at my work," Guest says in her artist's
statement, "and you'll see a story. If you take the time, and
the
chance, these characters will draw you into their world and make
the trip worthwhile - a world... compliments of your own
imagination."

As with "The Walrus and the Carpenter" poem in Lewis Carroll's
classic "Through the Looking Glass," when viewing Guest's art,
the time has come to talk of many things â¦ "of shoes and
ships/and sealing wax...of cabbages and kings/And why the sea is
boiling hot, and whether pigs have wings."

Guest, who holds a bachelor's degree in fine arts from Park
College, has also studied art at the Kansas City Art Institute,
University of Missouri-Columbia and Columbia College. She is
well-known in Mid-Missouri, especially for her murals in public
buildings, including an historical depiction of early Missouri
history in the Howard County Courthouse, Ronald McDonald House
Family Room mural in Boone Hospital in Columbia, and a newly
completed mural which she donated for the children's wing of the
Fayette Public Library.

Guest
believes in sharing her art as a social responsibility: other
donations of her work have gone to the Ronald McDonald House,
University Hospital, in Columbia; University of
Missouri-Columbia Museum of Art and Archeology; Fayette Area
Public Trust (for fund raising); Howard County Fire District;
and Animal Rescue Volunteers in Sims Valley, Calif.

Guest's reputation as a multi-media artist has brought her
invitations from a number of institutions throughout the country
to display her art. These include a show in Chicago in June at
the American Association of Botanical Gardens and Arboreta; a
show in the Lauritzen Botanic Gardens in Omaha, Neb.; the
Steinhardt Gallery-Brooklyn Botanic Gardens in 2004; Powell
Gardens in Kansas City in 2001; and previous exhibitions at CMU.